That was the heading of a Web site, which constantly reports about new gadgets. It is very exciting to hear, finally, I’m just looking for a smartphone, which can cover my needs. But when I read that article until the end, I was very disappointed. The article contains a list of countries where XPERIA X1 should be available. The problem is, Germany is not in the list! What does it mean? Are the developing countries more interesting markets? Somehow I do not understand why. I hope that it is only a mistake, I can’t accept such disadvantage to Germany. I had many phones from Sony Ericsson and I was always very happy with them, but if Sony Ericsson really not interested in our market, I will no longer buy their mobile phones. I would buy better HTC Touch Pro or HTC Touch HD.
Update:
I read the article again carefully and noted that not only Germany but also U.S. and China are not in the list. It is possible that Sony Ericsson lacks the capacity to provide a sufficient number of devices for big markets. That would be a logical explanation, at least on my part. Although I find it pretty miserable, what the manufacturers and software developers are doing. They tell about a product, though the product is not finished. XPERIA X1 was already announced a year ago and until now we have only a list of countries where it should be released soon and nothing else.
Today finally came out the first beta version of for a long time announced Opera Mobile 9.5.
I waited for this moment very, very long and it was the reason why I decided to not purchase the iPhone. I hoped that Opera Mobile will be a full replacement for Safari Mobile. But my expectations were not met. This beta still quite unstable. The first problem is a long-known bug and occurs in different programs, if the program is running and then the device goes in the sleep mode. After waking up the program does not work properly. It crashes or, as in the case of Opera, it dont’t work anymore. In my Asus I could change to the desktop by getting the shift button pressed, but a restart was necessary because the program did not work. The second disappointment was the display of a site in the overview mode. Unlike Safari Mobile Opera presents a site in this mode very illegible, so you can only guess what field you should center. The center also does not work as I wish or as Safari normally do. For example, if I call cnn.com and get an overview of the news header and would like to zoom in the header, which consists of an image (left) and a text (right), Opera can center either on the text or on the image. Safari Mobile recognizes this area as a block and zooms correctly. The Google website will be displayed not really good too.
All this would not be so bad, it is only a beta version, but it will be sold already with HTC Diamond as a full version. In addition, the developers have been announced Opera 9.5 Mobile many months ago, and showed video how the new Opera works. They took so much time and the result is not very good. Unbelievably …
Mobile Football is not a game for PDAs, as someone might think, but an application designed specifically for European Championship. This application will allow you to follow the European Championship live.
By installing of this application you will get an access not only to the detailed data about each team, results, and upcoming games, the program offers much more than just pure data.
The graphical interface of Mobile Football is very intuitive and easy to use. Not only football fans will be able to use it, but also simple interested rightly too.
The application offers a possibility, to bet together with friends, for the forthcoming results of the games and collect the score.
Here is the feature list:
Game Calender: You can find information and dates of the upcoming games
Results of the games: will be constantly updated
General information about the cities and stadiums where the games take place
Statistics and history of each team and each player
Statistics for individual games
Latest News
The application is really great. You can see that the developers invested a lot of time and effort into the developing of the program. It is therefore particularly gratifying that Mobile Football is completely free and you can download it from the website of the developer.
After purchasing of iPod touch, I thought that there is no better browser for mobile devices, then mobile safari. Although I heard repeatedly that Apple has developed a revolutionary new browser for iPhone, but I could not imagine that browsing the WWW with a PDA-like device could be so handy.
Mobile Safari has significant advantages over traditional mobile browsers such as Internet Explorer or Opera Mobile Mobile 8.xx.
Here are some of them:
1.The speed - Mobile Safari loads sites more quickly
2.Very good support of web technologies such as XHTML, JavaScript and Ajax
3.Tabbled browsing - you can comfortably open multiple tabs and switch between them
4. Zoom: Unlike above rivals, Mobile Safari shows a web page as an overview, then you can focus different parts of a web page with a double-tap, so that this part will be automatically fit to screen.
5.Quick-time video support: You can see embedded video sequences in quick time format, even in full-screen mode.
and some screenshots:
It is no wonder that the other browser developers try to implement these ideas in own products. The reaction of Microsoft in form of Windows Mobile 6.1 with an improved version of Internet Explorer is not particularly noteworthy, because the improvements seem to be limited. The new Opera version is much more interesting in this case. The developers promise us many interesting features. We can discuss long, who copies which product, but as a consumer, I find this movement a good thing because I can save a lot of money by abdication of buying of iPhone and conversion to the new operation system, instead I can use my existing device.
Here is a list of the features that developers of Opera promise:
1.Opera will be faster
2.The user interface will be redesigned, it should be much more intuitive to navigate,
3.Zoom effect à la iPhone / iPod touch
4.Support of flash - this feature is one of the main arguments when choosing between Safari and Opera Mobile
5.Widgets - small Web programs
Opera Mobile in action:
This all sounds very good and the price of about $ 20 is ok if you consider how much money you are saving, while renouncing the purchase of iPhone. The only problem is Opera Mobile is still in the development.
ScummVM makes it possible to run old adventure games on Pocket PC-Platform.
ScummVM is free Software under GPL-License, which can emulate old games from Lucas Arts, Revolution Software, Adventure Soft, Interactive Binary Illusions, The Dreamers Guild, Humongous Entertainment and Sierra-Online.
I installed Full Throttle on my Pocket PC and it works very fine. At last I have a possibility to play the best adventure game of all time “The Dig”. There is only one problem, this game is very hard to find.
With this software you can edit and retouch your photos, add special effects and draw your own graphics. I think that Pocket Artist is the best software for image editing, it has many very interesting and useful features such as Levels, Bright/Contrast, Hue/Saturation, Color Curves, Resize Image, Crop Image, Clone Stamp, Work with Layers, miscellaneous Filter-Functions and much more. Of cource you would say, that image editing on Pocket PC is childish and useless, but I think that it is very important to have this feature on my device.
SPB Insight works with the same principle as AvantGo but the programmers from SPB Software House promise noticeable more performance, but not for free.
The Software is from the beginning not free and it costs $19.95 (once), but it is free from advertising and you have no size-limitations.
The other highlight of this software are user-interface, it has not only a good design, but also a good functionality. It seems that the programmers spent a lot of time with analyzing customers’ wishes. For example you are able now to admin your channels from the software, so you don’t need to login in web interface for that any more.
You are also able to make separate update all of your channels and you have still a possibility to choose the channels from the online catalogue or make own one from rss or atom-feeds.
ICQ is one of the most used web applications on PC and I think that any of Pocket PC owners early or later decide to install this messenger on their devices. But Pocket ICQ from Mirabilis seems to be forgotten by their developers. That’s why it is worth to see some alternative messengers that support protocol of ICQ.
One of the alternative messengers with support of ICQ protocol is mChat.
This Program has many advantages such as:
• it’s free
• Multilingual Interface (English, German, Russian)
• Two rows contact list (for better overview)
• Smiles-Support
• Quick switch between program-windows with tabs
• Shows X-Status
• Shows Information about ICQ-Client on the other side (e.g. QIP)
Disadvantages:
• Don’t support Toonel.net
Homepage of Project:
http://mgslab.com/Index.php?&lng=en
AvantGo is a program with that you can synchronise and read predefined and self made channels on your Pocket PC, Palm or mobile phone.
After the registration on the Website www.avantgo.com you have a possibility to choose the channels from a big list of predefined news or to make a new one from rss-feed. After the sync, that takes around 2 or 3 minutes (Depends on the size of your channels) you can read your channels offline.
The maximum size of free account is 2 Megabytes and it is enough for 10 or 15 channels, but if you want to have more space, you may buy 8 Megabytes for only $19.95 annually.
Resco Explorer is a file manager for Windows Mobile that I use as alternative for native file manager. Unlike Windows Explorer, that supports only basic functions, Resco Explorer has dozens of useful features. There are such features as registry-manager that makes editing of registry possible, ftp-tool, zip de-compressor, network browser, encryption-tool, viewer for text and graphic, today plugin with system information + quick launch toolbar and so on.
But not only the features played a big role for me, but also design and it is really good.
There is only one disadvantage for me, it is the price of $24.95.
